I can’t wait to see the look on Monica’s face tomorrow. She’d just gotten her equilibrium back, after the overwhelming experience of meeting Euryale, being iced, snogged back to life, and hugged by a gorgon-groupie… and now this!!

Right back on brain-fry. Poor lass. This has not been a quiet week for her.

If she were Opus she would want to spend some time in her dandelion patch, recovering. Unfortunately, her equivalent (the sand bar) kinda isn’t there any longer.

“Really”, of course. *sigh* I really hate tablet soft-keypads… forty years of touchtyping experience helps not at all.

Anyhow… this little bombshell from Euryale might just explain how certain incidents involving the hurling of small objects into incandescent orbit were successfully “not really noticed” by the local police. Enough influence in the right places (maybe Jin’s contacts with the immortal Politicians helped set it up) can cover up a lot of unusual events.

I’ll loan you a clean shop towel… got a bag of them around here for miscellaneous cleanup jobs. I think I may need to buy some more… they’re going to be in demand after this little bit of news gets around!

While you’re doing that, please pick my jaw up for me – it fell off and rolled behind the Confusion Couch…..

And, back to USO’s (the objects not the road show) – anyone remember a TV series from England featuring, among other things, a secret anti-UFO agency that protected Earth with the aid of submarines that could launch their forward half as a fighter plane from underwater?

Great, now I got visions of Will Smith flirting with Brandi and failing badly, while Tommy Lee Jones hits Monica with a Memory Wiper. Meanwhile, Tez shmoozes with the coffee aliens, but they’re not drinking coffee… 😉

Monica’s a ‘person of interest’, possibly due to her both wielding a literal earth-shattering weapon and functioning (or at least ‘functioned’) as a pathway via dimensions of reality.

Shelly’s just a human in-the-know. Apparently Sphinx-humans aren’t that uncommon, so she’s of no more interest than Katherine, Amanda, Allan, or Kevin.

Tina’s more of a liability, and even less likely to receive any sort of special-help than the humans listed above. Based upon the way Jin, Bud, and Phix speak to/about her, life’d probably be simpler if Tina was ‘removed’.

So, Tina’s point in that strip remains valid. If Monica, Nudge, or the GGG aren’t there to protect them, Shelly and Tina are likely to need defense (well, beyond Shelly’s on/off Popeye arms) against the ‘wrong sort’. Especially considering their levels of influence on Monica, Bud, Brandi, and Jin.

I dunno about Shelly needing protection. She’s got the sphinx form she can revert to (I doubt all sphinxy humans can do that since she only managed it after spending 80K years in the Time Forest), and if she encounters other sphinxes, CG is apparently capable of protecting her from them. 🙂

Tina…well, I doubt that any of our supernatural crew would let anyone harm their favorite barista, and Nudge would likely feel obligated to help out by manipulating someone into protecting her if the others didn’t step in first.

But all that aside, it is interesting to think about how Tina’s statement is somewhat more valid than I initially thought.

Yep, I fondly remember all the puppet-tech special effects, purple-haired moon girls (woot) and the SkyDiver submarine – which was also a hover-submarine (high speed sea-skim mode). Also remember an articleabout how Space: 1999 was supposed to be a sequel-series at first to UFO.

Hmm.. maybe they weren’t as “intoxicated”as they wanted Tepoz, or the world to believe.
It could be that they were secretly already busy redeeming their chimera-doings by setting-up all sorts of fail-saves.

Remember that they were “put on ice” so to speak.
That hampered their attempts of setting things right quite seriously, so they probably wanted to prevent that happening again, playing pi**ed drunk, while they actually were busy in the background, maybe even in cahoots with Jin and her governmental pets..

Paul has alluded in the past that the girls were far more autonomous that Tepoz had let on. There is also the factor that he and the girls have hid plenty of truths from everyone else in the past to prevent that knowledge from messing up their plans.

It does make sense to me… because Brandi obviously expected to have been informed if someone found a vimana cell. She was furious that this hadn’t happened.

Her strong anger rather implies that there’s a good reason for her to have believed that the discovery of a vimana cell would have been brought to her attention. Nothing we’ve seen in the storyline or dialog, up until now, would have explained this belief…

… but the presence of a secret paranormal-investigation organization, of which she is a co-founder and which still presumably reports to her (La Chessmaster) certainly would. That sort of discovery… by Monica’s clan… would have been something that the MIB should have known about, and reported to her promptly.

Either “her people” slipped up, or at least one of them chose to block a message to her for some reason. In either case she’d be upset (to put it mildly).

And if the Prime Directive of this organization is to track contain V-cells, someone is now on Brandi’s doo-doo list. After all, a lot of Lanthian artifacts would be nothing but curiosities, dead machines that our culture may not even recognize as machines …unless they were powered …

One of the charms of this series was that it all centered about a small group with extrordinary capabilities. No government knowledge. No assists from military or police organizations. Just them doing their thing to save the world.

Now we know that, not only has Brandi been doing things behind everyone’s back all along, but there are government people monitoring them the whole time. Such a wide scope, to me anyway, kills the “little group” feeling of the series. Not to mention placing Monica more in the position of a lab rat than a leader. Long as she goes through the maze okay they leave her alone.

Were I her, I would go balistic about now. Brandi has been hiding things from her, and now she and bud have been working behind her back the whole time, never letting her know. I would feel like I’m being totally manipulated and not trusted at all. Nor could I trust any of the others involved at all at this point. They’ve already screwed her over once. I believe I’d wash my hands of the lot of them.

Sounds like Bud and Brandi taking responsibility for some of their past, as well as keeping to their command to protect Monica. A inside-gov crew running interference for M would explain why there hasn’t been more notice taken.

Of course, a metahuman Great Power under the (Indian?) Ocean is a pretty profound “political” concept in itself. Odd that there should be so few written works about it.

Though I suppose an underwater people might prefer to keep records in a sound format…

No, I mean as opposed to NO government anything involved. Once that sort of thing gets introduced into a story it seems we start getting into some rogue elements of government running loose doing nasty things as well. Now I expect to see things like kidnapping Jin by some entity in a bid to control the others, car chases, shootouts, all the usual crapola writers tend to put into their stories once the government is involved. In other words devolviing into the same old garbage we’ve seen a few thousand times in books and movies.

I definatly see your points about the change in feel this may cause the series, but it makes a certain amount of sense. After 56 run throughs, Brandi, Jin and to a lesser extent, Shelly would have seen what would happen without covert protection for Monica and company, and would have seen how she would have reacted to the idea of a goverment agency watching out for her. Since she wasn’t told, I’m guessing not well.

From the story telling side of things, Paul may be ready to introduce us to the larger weirdness that exists in the Wapsiverse. This would seem to be the doorway to that. And Monica is the perfect person for us to ride along with so I’m gonna hold on and see what happens.

Except that none of them but Jin remembered the 56 resets. Brandi may have written instructions to herself from one cycle to the next via the Library, but aside from that, no normal person – Monica, the ‘gods’, the government – would have known what was happening and what had gone before. Jin may have put Bud, Brandi, and the ‘gods’ up to making the MiB to protect Monica and keep the various dangers that paranormal beings and things like gorgons and Lanthean technology would give rise to, under control…

Just to keep things straight in my own head, Jin rentained her memories of all her trips through the resets. Brandi realized what was going on and set out to influence all of her alternate selves downstream and through said alternate selves, everyone else. May was able to observe and influence from the demon realm. Shelly was also outside of time, traveling backwards and sending information upstream through Phix and Nudge.

Monica is the recipient and agent of a vast suppourt network whose sole reason was to point her at the calender machine problem so she could fix it. It has been hinted at that the reason she has been given only the information she needed was that to do otherwise proved disastrous.

Phix’s “Until now, you’ve been the center,” has a lot more meaning. This go round of the calender cycle, Monica was the center. It’s also cool to realise she’s a hero to all the folks that made what she did possible. Now that it’s no longer nessesary to keep her in the dark, it’d be nice to meet them and see them get some recognition.

Of course, she’s going to be pissed about being kept in the dark and manipulated. So, fireworks ahead? Should be interesting.

Erm.. So it’s ‘easier’ to assume that everyone in the “real world” that the comic exists in, is either completely stupid or obtuse to the point of deliberately ignoring rather extreme events such as golf balls being hurled into the sun?

Umm, yeah. Exactly why does this change the feel? Now we know EXACTLY why the government isn’t involved more, when in ‘reality (ours)’ they’d be all over the girls just for the golf ball and ‘CM hurled into the sun’ incidents that they’d never have a moments peace.

If anything this helps clear up *why* the girls have carte blanche to do practically whatever they want without outside influence. No wire taps, no secret government surveillance, no arrests for ‘suspicious behavior’, etc.

Suffice to say Monica is *not* the defacto supreme leader, which is just as well since she is prone to extreme mood swings and irritability. I’d say she was the ‘star’ of a group whose supporting cast had just as strong a roles to fill, but due to someone having to have top billing, she does. By about 1% over the rest.

As with opinions, everyone has a different set, but to me this clears up more, yet doesn’t diminish anything. It does show that the GG are more than just filler waiting to react to something Monica says, which is a *very good* thing indeed.

I’m actually inclined to agree with you regarding the government awareness not being a problem (other than the fact that it made my brain go “kerblooey”).

Besides, from a story-telling perspective, the government already knowing about the undersea stuff could make getting access to it much more interesting and Mission Impossible-ish. Euryale didn’t say that the MiB knew about it (though they probably do), so the government entities involved could be more hostile to Monica’s investigations. I’m down for that kind of twist. 🙂

hmm, well, they may just say, huh, we dont disturb them, they turn a blind eye… MiB are more about ‘illegal extraterrestrials’ than the mythical magic stuff.. 🙂
the main remit is to keep a low profile!

And yeah, M is just like Neo in the matrix… the ‘right’ person that may be the solution.. you do know there have been many Neos, that did not ‘work out’ before??

Yes, it clears things up, but to me it’s like sugar coating it all. “Oh, they knew all about it from the get go.” All that does is throw all the non-interference into a neat little package. It would have been much more interesting to have the girls do things to keep the authorities in the dark. Perhaps the occasional interference from one of the immortals or whoever.

I would have had no problem with the “authorities” being supernatural beings manipulating things from a realm of their own and watching out for Monica from there, but not our own government. I have this image of Paul walking away from the drawing board, dusting off his hands, and saying “there … that takes care of that.” I guess I just expected more than such a trite plot device. Yeah, I know, it’s not my story to tell.

Groundhog Day. The first couple go rounds, you try to keep everyone in the loop. After X times you stop trying to keep everyone informed and focus on having everything in place to move forward. I think everything is being revealed at a “natural pace” given that everything is now “new”. Nothing has changed, our perception has just been broadened.

Indeed, the story has been broadened, but in what direction? Yes, a device was needed to show why the government didn’t interfere, but MIB? Government coverups? Please. Paul is a great story teller and I just expected more than tired old plot devices I guess.

For instance, something based on a covert “legal” interaction of demons. Getting them to disuade the appropriate people to ignore what was going on at any point. Even to prompt some people to act in ways beneficial to the overall goal. After all, the demons are everywhere in human society and exert a great deal of influence. Tina could have been deeply involved, explaining her comment to the day of the dead doll regarding the work she has yet to do. Just a solution that kept things more “in house” I suppose.

At the least, hopefully we’ll find out the MIB folks aren’t humans. Sphinx-human hybrids where Shelly can fit in finally? Maybe some other creatures yet to be introduced. I would say a Minotaur species, but it would more likely be some form of female being.

Hey, man, this particular twist is literally less than 24 hours old, at this point. We know next to nothing about what the Wapsiverse “Men In Black” actually do, who they really work for, or who they are. All we know for semi-certain (taking the word of one cute gorgon) is that it’s “government”, that Brandi and Bud were founders, and that it’s co-educational. We don’t have any idea how many of the MIB are standard-issue human (possibly zero!), how many are immortals or demons or sphinxes or gorgons or ???, what they view their charter as being, what they normally do, etc.

You seem intent on spending a lot of effort condemning what you think this plot twist will mean, and where it will take the Wapsiverse. You might want to give Paul a few days or weeks or months to actually show us what he’s thinking and planning, before you decide that you don’t like it, or that It’s All Stuff That Has Been Done To Death Before.

One thing I’ve concluded, in the six months or so I’ve been reading Wapsi, is that Paul often does what we do not expect. In fact, he seems to revel in it.

Well, I suppose I could commission Paul to work the word “Illuminati” into a throwaway panel (e.g. the name of a carpet store M is passing on the street, or something like that), just to see what happens… 😈

When I first came across the term “Men In Black” it was in John Keel’s Mothman Prophecies, where he supposedly recounts strange events during a 1960s UFO flap in West Virginia.

His MIBs were the kind that tried to look normal, but were (poorly) hiding their unfamiliarity with human society. After even a short conversation, they would give you a really creepy vibe, and you knew they weren’t normal at all– i.e. not from the US government.

The X-Files and Will Smith franchises kind of buried this older take on MIBs as being another alien intruder, instead pilots of ATF black helicopters or something. So I suspect that if Paul’s MIBs are big fans of Monica’s, they are probably no more human than Euryale here is.

@SoWhyMe, I agree. I’d like to see Dan Brown beaten vigourosly about the head and shoulders with a wet noodle, mostly for giving the History Channel an excuse to stop doing shows on actual history.

Oh look, the Vatican has a secret plot to take over the Masons and recover the lost treasure of the Templars. It involves UFOs. And Bigfoot.

And Elvis. (Did I leave anything out?)

I’m going to give Paul the benifit of the doubt, because he has yet to dissapoint. What he’s done with myth so far has been great, and I’m actually looking forward to seeing his take on mythic clandetine organizations.

I know I always believe everything that’s written about the Vatican conspiracy–including the Masons, illuminati, Opus Dei, and all the rest–because they did such a bang-up job for 1070 years running the Papal States. (Also include: Zionists, Bilderberg Group, United Nations, the Federal Reserve System, Council on Foreign Relations, and Communists)

Heck–if they couldn’t run two or three small provinces in central Italy, what’s the chance of running a world-wide conspiracy.

Maybe not. It may not be a coincidence she was there right when Monica was. Perhaps the powers decided to let Monica in on the joke and she was chosen. Monica seems to be a bit aprehensive of her and less likely to explode right then. I mean, everyone has lied to Monica up to this point, playing a part in the grand plan. Why should squirmy head be any different?

Just remember that while Jin has had 56 iterations of the time loop sequentially to deal with, Brandi has rediscovered her prior activities 56 times. Now it seems at one point she and Bud started a covert protection squad to help run interference for Monica!

So — who/where is this secret organization of human, trans-human, and mystical peoples, the Waspians?

I have the image of secret hand shakes and a tiny Wasp button on their lapels…

Oh thank you very much (I owe you a serious wedgie) I now have an image in my mind of Phix and Nudge with the immortal politician Kukulcan, Brandy, Bud Jin and May smiling in black suits and sunglasses

I think I’m reading this differently than most people. I don’t think this organization, formed (and possibly run by) Bud and Brandy would ever do anything to stop Monica. If they did they would have the chimera to deal with…just sayin..

Sure they’ve had a “Big Brother” looking over them, but not in that “play the cards right and you keep doing what you’re doing” way. No no I think its very much the opposite, I think anytime Monica was stuck, they subtly dropped a helping hand. For example, if that submarine sunk in Ireland, how in the world did Stinky get it? or if you think that was coincidence, a Squid whose home is in the Mediterranean, just so happens to be travelling through the Bermuda Triangle, with a submarine from the English channel, that contains exactly what Bud needs.
“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.”
I see three coincidences there, classifying it as “enemy action”.
Of course, back to what Jin said, Monica is her only enemy….

I think in this instance the government agents see themselves as more like the Secret Service rather than Big Brother or even a Praetorian Guard.
They know they’re dealing with something that’s way out of their league and just want things to run as smoothly as possible.

I must be the only one who read that and thought “Oh, she knows Bud and Brandi”; the Men in Black thing didn’t really phase me.

To be honest, it makes sense. Anyone involved in the calendar machine plan would need protecting; since the GG couldn’t act overtly (being supposedly drunk off their gourds), they secretly created a government agency to do it for them, one that could cover things up if they got out of hand. Do it far enough ahead of time, and have them investigate all sorts of paranormal happenings, and when it comes time to cover Monica and Shelly, it’s just another case. No one knows how important they really are, so no questions are asked. Plus the other stuff they turn up could always come in handy after the calendar is dealt with.

OK, the MiB, and Bud and Brandi’s involvement with them, is totally unexpected and mind blowing (HEAD ASPLODY!!). But what attracts my attention is that those in the agency that protects humanity from weirdness are all apparently in Monica’s fanclub…

I was looking at some of Euryale’s text in today’s panels, and my conclusion was that Paul must have a font set up. I looked at the “S” and “T” characters, and as far as I can tell from staring at a couple of screens, every instance of each such letter looks identical.

If this is a font Paul drew up for his own use, maybe he would consider making it available in a popular font-file format as an “In return for a donation” goodie?

Since it’s a single-case font, i would have made two complete sets of letters, one for the uppercase and one for the lowercase positions, so that you could vary things a bit – like if you had a double letter, the two would be slightly different…

On the other hand, Bud’s certainly acting more than a bit guilty in the first couple of frames today… and the fact that Brandi is referring directly to “the vimana cells” suggests that she expects Bud to know just what they are.

So, the interesting question arises: just what did Bud know, and when did she know it?

It now looks as if Bud may have known quite a lot, and may have known it quite some time ago!

Whether Bud had any specific reason to look guilty about Brandi’s ignorance of the discovery, remains to be seen. By us, that is… I imagine Paul knows 🙂

No need to pay the Prescience credits in cash… just leave them on deposit… I’m sure I’ll need to pay off a Pun Jar bill sometime soon.